36 LE- TTE-R FROM THE- E-AST r ""ìiiiiiii; ALLEN COVE, FEBRUARY 8 O N an afternoon in the spring of 1938, foreseeing a change in my hfe, I rode the sub\V'2 Y down to Cortlandt Street, visited Peter Henderson's seed store, dnd Clme a way with a mixed order of flower and veg- etable seeds. The bill was nineteen dol- lars. Peter Henderson is long gone, and tÎ1nes have changed-but not the warm, receptive earth, yielding to the ad vances of the sun. Today, with so much wrong with the planet, with ev- eryone discouraged and unedsy and SOme desperdte, almost the only things tha t can dispel the gloom for Ine are the bright and fraudulent pictur<:s in et seed catalogue and the glad crv that is- sues froln a box of day-old chicks ar- riving on an April morning from the h<ltchery. Our 1 975 orders went off in the Inail three weeks ago. The seeds elme to sixty-seven dollars, up froln nineteen. A hab, chick this spring will Cost llle thirty-three centS, up five cents from the 1974 chick. Even so, there is hardly a better buy around: the seed, the exploded egg, the perennial promise that they hold. In the years that have intervened SInce 1938, we have not Inissed a springtime of this wild dream- ing and scheming. \Ve are hooked and are making no attelnpt to kIck the habit. I'm behind on my correspondence, and this letter is overdue Quite aside from the meSS my desk is in, everything else here in the Edst is in a Iness, just as it is in other parts of the nation, dnd in all parts of the world. The strain has begun to show in people's faces. Events and portents swirl around all our heads in dazzling array and in great numbers. Oil. s U nelnploYlnent. N uclear power pldnts. The spruce budworm. The SST. Land use and zoning. The plight of the smal1 hospital. Pollution. The supertanker. 'Vlndmills. Lead poisoning in the pottery. Passama- quodd y . Food stamps. The p rice of gas at the pump. The price of dough- nuts In the store. The power of the federal governlnent. The long shdd- ow of the Stdte. The fuel-adjustment additive. Breaking and entering. Drug abuse. Centralization. The disappcelr- ance of haddock. Russian trawlers. Arab sheikhs. It is all very confusIng, makes one's head swim. Last Novem- ber, the voters became so confused they forgot to elect a Republican or a Democrat for governor and elected in- stead an independent insurance 111an, James Longley, who is said to sleep onl) four hours a nIght, jogs at day- light, and summons people to his office at seven o'clock in the morning to start puttIng the state on a sound busi- ness basis. I met my pharn1acist on the treet the other ddy-he is a freshm<:ln me111ber of the legislature. And when I asked him how he liked being up in ..I. ugusta he 1 eplied, "IA)ve it." Then, in a sentence that followed along nat- urally, he used the phrase "viable al- ternative," and I marvelled at how quickly he had learned the language of governlnent. Longley likes the word ". " 1 k " ffi 1 Input an( on ta Ing 0 ce acccpte( a fifteen-thousand-dollar input to his sal- ary. He has SInce declared his willing- ness to cancel it. It is all quite confus- ing, and SOlnetÎ1nes scary. But in many ways things are the same as they've al ways been, here- abouts. The Februar} days lengthen, the light strengthens, the plow goes by in the night. Our woodpile, thanks to Henry Allen, who keeps disappearing into the woods mounted on a Cub trac- tor and towing a small tLliler, has built to nine cords-mostlj birch this year. \\Then one of my hens prepares to lay an ègg, she picks up a fev. sh reds of nesting Inaterial and tosses then1 onto her back, as hens have been doing ever since the egg was invented. ()n sub- Zero Inornings, the vapor rises from the bay, obscuring HerrÏ1nan Point If the day is quiet and the sea calIn, the scallop dragger move out to the fish- ing grounds to mdke their sweeps. The price of scallops is down from what it was a year ago. 'Ve get ours direct from La wrence Cole, right off his boat. 'Ve buy a gallon, eat el 111eSS, and freeze the rest. I'm not supposed to eat sC<,ll- lops, but I love the taste of cholesterol and can't leave them alone. Ld w re nc e told Ine this is his forty-sixth year at it. There was a wedding in town this winter. ':Valter Crockett, our master carpenter and cabinetmaker, got m(lr- ried at the age of ninety-three. He 111et his bride-a younger woman-in the nUl sing home where they had both gone to die: and, such is the power of love, they sprang from the h0111e dnd are happily s<:ttled in Penobscot, keep- ing house. This, it seems to me, pret- t) well takes the wind out of Barbara \Valters' s(lÎls. 1 heard her SelY on tele- vision that marridge, as we know it, is on the way out and will be gone by the year 2000 I didn't take much stock in that. Many of the remarks you heal on television are questionable, ex- FEßRVARY 2.4-. 1975 cept on the Tarzan hour, which I nev- eI miss if 1 can help it. In the jungle world Il1en h.:-lve managed to create for theIl1selves, with its gloomy Wdrs, its smashed atom, its hair sprays that thre(lten the 070ne layer, its balance of power, and its absence of .:-lny senSI- hIe and orderly way (except Kis- singel) to settle the Inyriad things that need to be settled, Tarzan in his loin- cloth i the one person who seems at hOlnc in the environl11ent, as he utters his \V'ild cry and swings cllong on those old l110ss-covered docking lines. His speech nowada) s is immaculate, and his rapport with <,lnÏ1nals has al ways been good. There is a little five-year- old girl In our town who can't tell "- time by the clock but knows instinc- tively when the hour of Tarzan is at hand. She runs to her grandmother (lnd insists that the set be turned on so she Cdn partake of the \V eintl <,lub deli- ca te sen. ;\ J 1.1 sorts of queer and uneÀpectcd ,ß. events have taken place since m) last report from the East. In the near- hy town of Blue Hill, ordinarily a quiet vilLlge, heavj machinery arrived three SUln111crs dgo and began lipping the tovvn to pieces, to Inake room for a new steèl-and-concrete wing for the hospital <,lnd a sewage-treatment plant for the to\V'n, at the head of the harbor. 'rhe noise was a wful. Month after 111onth, a giant crane swept the sky, and ten-wheel trucks bearing the leg- end ",,",\lE :\JOVE THE EARl'H" banged through the Stl eets hauling gravel and rubble from one Spot and dumping them into another Spot. The hospital was in a survival situc:üion: unless its bed patien ts were moved from the orig- inal wooden building into fireproof quarters, Medicare pal ments would be cut off, and this \Nould spell certdin dool11. The operdtIon cost more than two 111illion dollars-a trel11endous tab for so s111all a coml11unity. People baked pies, knit sweaters, put on auc- tion sales, staged variet T shows in the town hall, and dug into sagging pock- etbooks. It was a near thing for a while, but it's over now: the wing is occupied. '" e have wdll-to-walJ car- peting in the corridors, parking space outside for a hundred cars, telephones b) every bed, air-conditioning, and a nurses' station thdt goes beep heep. Patients have a view of the hdrbor and a view of the sewage-treatment facility. Meantime, over at Harborside on Cape Rosier, just above the beautiful little reversing falls of Goose Cove, a Inining company called Callahan w dS busy. They dammed the falls, shutting